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Let's talk about PHP. The scripting language, not the health insurance. PHP is, in my opinion, one of the greatest development tools ever created. It didn't start out that way, which is where most of its bad rap comes from, but it has transformed over the past decade into something worth using for any size project (and people do!). More specifically, I've personally found PHP to be an excellent prototyping and command-line scripting tool. I don't generally have to fire up Visual Studio to do complex things because I have access to a powerful cross-platform capable toolset at my fingertips. It's the perfect language for prototyping useful ideas without being forced into a box.

When writing a TCP server, the most difficult task at the beginning of the process is deciding what port number to use. The Transmission Control Protocol has a range of port numbers from 0 to 65535. The range of an unsigned short integer (2 bytes). In today's terms, that is a fairly small space of numbers and it is quite crowded out there. Fortunately, there are some rules you can follow:

Specifying port 0 will result in a random port being assigned by the OS. This is ideal only if you have some sort of auto-discovery mechanism for finding the port your users are interested in (e.g. connecting to a web server on port 80 and requesting the correct port number). Otherwise, you'll have to occupy an "open" port number.The first 1023 port numbers are reserved by some operating systems (e.g. Linux). Under those OSes, special permissions are required to run services on port numbers under 1024. Specifically, the process either has to have been started by the 'root…